Techniques for pipelined broadcast on ethernet switched clusters

Abstract

By splitting a large broadcast message into segments and broadcasting the segments in a pipelined fashion, pipelined broadcast can achieve high performance in many systems. In this paper, we investigate techniques for efficient pipelined broadcast on clusters connected by multiple Ethernet switches. Specifically, we develop algorithms for computing various contention-free broadcast trees that are suitable for pipelined broadcast on Ethernet switched clusters, extend the parametrized LogP model for predicting appropriate segment sizes for pipelined broadcast, show that the segment sizes computed based on the model yield high performance, and evaluate various pipelined broadcast schemes through experimentation on Ethernet switched clusters with various topologies. The results demonstrate that our techniques are practical and efficient for contemporary fast Ethernet and Giga-bit Ethernet clusters.